It's almost ironic that the one industry we deal with that is directly related
to entertainment has been the least exciting for the longest time. The graphics
world has been littered with controversies surrounding very fickle things as of
late; the majority of articles you'll see relating to graphics these days don't
have anything to do with how fast the latest $500 card will run. Instead, we're
left to argue about the definition of the word "cheating". We pick at
pixels with hopes of differentiating two of the fiercest competitors the GPU world
has ever seen, and we debate over 3DMark.

What's interesting is that all of the things we have occupied ourselves with
in recent times have been present throughout history. Graphics companies have
always had questionable optimizations in their drivers, they have almost always
differed in how they render a scene and yes, 3DMark has been around for quite
some time now (only recently has it become "cool" to take issue with
it).

So why is it that in the age of incredibly fast, absurdly powerful DirectX
9 hardware do we find it necessary to bicker about everything but the hardware?
Because, for the most part, we've had absolutely nothing better to do with this
hardware. Our last set of GPU reviews were focused on two cards - ATI's Radeon
9800 Pro (256MB) and NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, both of which carried a
hefty $499 price tag. What were we able to do with this kind of hardware? Run
Unreal Tournament 2003 at 1600x1200 with 4X AA enabled and still have power
to spare, or run Quake III Arena at fairytale frame rates. Both ATI and NVIDIA
have spent countless millions of transistors, expensive die space and even sacrificed
current-generation game performance in order to bring us some very powerful
pixel shader units with their GPUs. Yet, we have been using them while letting
their pixel shading muscles atrophy.

Honestly, since the Radeon 9700 Pro, we haven't needed any more performance
to satisfy the needs of today's games. If you take the most popular game in
recent history, the Frozen Throne expansion to Warcraft III, you could run that
just fine on a GeForce4 MX - a $500 GeForce FX 5900 Ultra was in no way, shape
or form necessary.

The argument we heard from both GPU camps was that you were buying for the
future; that a card you would buy today could not only run all of your current
games extremely well, but you'd be guaranteed good performance in the next-generation
of games. The problem with this argument was that there was no guarantee when
the "next-generation" of games would be out. And by the time they
are out, prices on these wonderfully expensive graphics cards may have fallen
significantly. Then there's the issue of the fact that how well cards perform
in today's pixel-shaderless games honestly says nothing about how DirectX 9
games will perform. And this brought us to the joyful issue of using 3DMark
as a benchmark.

If you haven't noticed, we've never relied on 3DMark as a performance tool
in our 3D graphics benchmark suites. The only times we've included it, we've
either used it in the context of a CPU comparison or to make sure fill rates
were in line with what we were expecting. With 3DMark 03, the fine folks at
Futuremark had a very ambitious goal in mind - to predict the performance of
future DirectX 9 titles using their own shader code designed to mimic what various
developers were working on. The goal was admirable; however, if we're going to
recommend something to millions of readers, we're not going to base it solely
off of one synthetic benchmark that potentially may be indicative of the performance
of future games. The difference between the next generation of games and what
we've seen in the past is that the performance of one game is much less indicative
of the performance of the rest of the market; as you'll see, we're no longer
memory bandwidth bound - now we're going to finally start dealing with games
whose pixel shader programs and how they are handled by the execution units
of the GPU will determine performance.

All of this discussion isn't for naught, as it brings us to why today is so
very important. Not too long ago, we were able to benchmark Doom3 and show you
a preview of its performance; but with the game being delayed until next year,
we have to turn to yet another title to finally take advantage of this hardware
- Half-Life 2. With the game almost done and a benchmarkable demo due out on
September 30th, it isn't a surprise that we were given the opportunity to benchmark
the demos shown off by Valve at E3 this year.

Unfortunately, the story here isn't as simple as how fast your card
will perform under Half-Life 2; of course, given the history of the 3D graphics
industry, would you really expect something like this to be without controversy?

#74 - No, D3 isn't a DX9 game, its OGL. What it shows is that the FX series isn't bad - they just don't do so well under DX9. If you stick primarily to OpenGL games and run your DX games under the 8.1 spec, the FX should perform fine. It's the DX9 code that the FXes seem to really struggle with.Reply

#74: I have commonly heard this blamed on a bug in an older release of the CATALYST drivers that were used in the Doom3 benchmark. It is my understanding that if the benchmark was repeated with the 3.7 (RELEASED) drivers, the ATI would perform much better.

#75: I believe this goes back to prior instances where Nvidia has claimed that some new driver would increase performance dramatically to get it into a benchmark and then never release the driver for public use. If this happened, the benchmark would be unreliable as it could not be repeated by an end-user with similar results.

Also, the Det50 drivers from Nvidia do not have a working fog system. It has been hinted that this could be intentional to improve performance. Either way, I saw a benchmark today (forgot where) that compared the Det45's to the beta Det50's. The 50's did improve performance in 3DMark03 but no where near the 73% gap in performance seen in HL2.Reply

I didn't have time to look into this but can someone enlilghten me as to why the 5900 Ultra outperformed the 9800 PRO in the Doom 3 benchmarks we saw awhile back...is that not using DX9 as well? If I am way off the mark here or am even wrong on which outperformed which go easy on the flames!